Ninjas never say goodbye because they want you to think about them as soon as they’re gone.

I’ve known more than a few in my short life; a life that feels all the shorter for having known them. One day one of them will decide they told me too much. I will be in bed or maybe taking a leak with only twilight and the tinkling of piss on porcelain to guide me. Too much of a splatter will warn that I’m hitting tile instead and an acute correction is necessary. My hands will shift ever so slightly and then suddenly it won’t matter. The blade will be at my throat. And whoever does me in won’t even have the decency to whisper a goodbye in my ear as I fade away.

Not to mention leaving me in a pool of my own pee.

Ninjas are a bunch of bastards.

Being a ninjitsu journalist allows me to offer an expert opinion on the matter.

Sitting across from me is one I haven’t interviewed yet. One of the few that’s refused me up to this point. That’s another reason you can identify ninjitsu as an attention-seeking behavior: they’re almost always up for an interview. Gets ‘em business, you see. Accounts and jobs funneled their way. I’m free publicity. Shove some sake at them and they’re chatty bitches! But this particular one eluded my requests for months before agreeing to a sit down. With a very high cost.

She glances at me and I see anger in her eyes. It’s expected. She’s not the first ninja to be upset with me. Bad writeups hit them harder than poorly formed death poems. Kago Two-Fist came after me when I called his last job amateurish. Giles Delusahara threatened my mother for criticizing his choice of poisons. I’m used to it.

There’s also another small matter between the two of us at this diner booth: three months of dating. Three months of badgering. And finally her conditional acquiescence: she would do the interview, but after that we’d be done. Over. Kaput. Sayonara. It was either the relationship or the interview.

I made the natural choice. And she’s pissed but that’s alright. Passion is a good place to start an interview.

Her first few answers are quick, monosyllabic. Long fingers that had so recently wrapped around my tender parts flexed and relaxed. Mina ached to pull a dart from her sleeve and plunge it into my eye. I half-convinced myself that she was going to before we both got up, but if you’re reading this I imagine I made it home at least.

I didn’t bother asking for her key to my apartment back. What good would a deadbolt be against those nimble lock-picking fingers?

After the first questions I began to dig deeper. Things she had balked at telling me when we shared a bed rather than a diner table. Her home and youth, her parents influence on her career choice, how many Johnson-Kihoto generations had included her kind. How she felt about killing, how she absorbed or deflected it. What songs were on the password-protected iPod that she would never let me handle.

Those questions, though I skim over them here, are important. But they’re not what I’m writing about right now. They’ll be in some column tomorrow or next week or next month. But then I asked the one I had been holding onto for months. It was a dealbreaker from the start and I knew it would be. But after all our conversations and all our lovemaking and fucking and all her nights spent wordlessly staring out the window it was, like the interview itself, the natural choice.

“How do you expect to keep a real relationship, be loved, if you have to keep so secretive because of your career?”

“Fuck you, man,” she said and shoved herself up from the booth. “You’ve got your interview. That was a low blow.”

“Wait,” I stood up with her. She flinched, one hand slipping into the opposite sleeve to stroke a dart. Reflex; her body thought I might be attacking her. “Mina, I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to ask.”

Mina nodded. Her long, silken hair caught one of the streetlights outside and absorbed it like a black hole. She glared at me in silence.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say. A tear formed at the corner of her eye. My eyes were unexpectedly welling up on their own. Mina slipped slim, toned arms around me. Dry lips scratched gently against my right ear.

“Goodbye,” she whispered. The five-foot-four killing machine released me and walked out slowly, no flourish, no disappearing act.

Ninjas never say goodbye because they want you to think about them as soon as they’re gone.

Mine lit a cigarette under the streetlight. And then was gone.

Pretty easy to assume they’re going to do the same for other countries involved.

Watching this fiasco unfold it seemed that the UAE were the first to make such demands, quickly followed by Saudi Arabia. Ensuing requests seemed kind of secondary and just following suit. I was left, then, following two separate strains back to their origins to figure out the reasoning behind all this hubbub.

The United Arab Emirates

The cause here is pretty clear. The UAE exerts incredible force on any kind of reporting from inside the country. Dubai’s economy is failing on multiple levels, leaving huge half-finished skyscrapers dominating the skyline. The UAE has arrested correspondents and fined their agencies, fines that have to be paid if the agency doesn’t want to be wholly ousted from the country. Thus, information being relayed about the state of the country is necessarily spied upon, including messenger-type communications.

There’s also the little matter of the killing of a Hamas leader in Dubai recently. I imagine that kind of pissed the UAE off. Previously, Dubai’s been a bit of a free action zone, where operatives could move and meet in relative peace. That seems, like everything, to be changing.

Saudi Arabia

I actually draw Saudi Arabia’s ban roots even further back in history. While their economy doesn’t seem as dire right now, the royal family sits on a knife’s edge between western influence and domestic unrest and extremism. It made me think, almost instantly, about the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Saudi authorities physically severed all communication lines out of the country to control any news getting out. The one thing they missed was a US State Department secure line. Naturally, the US State Department received an inordinate number of calls from other countries and other agencies trying to figure out what the hell was going on in the blackout. Finally, they issued a public statement; the first about the seizure, causing incredible embarrassment in Saudi Arabia that the Americans announced it.

That being the case, I find Saudi Arabia’s pressure on RIM to be part of a larger effort to control what information gets out in the event of unrest or attacks in addition to simple surveillance protocol.

I’d say “it will be interesting to watch this unfold” but it looks like RIM is going to fold to all requests. It’ll be more interesting to see if there’s a chilling effect on dissidence in the area, or arrests stemming from morals offenses that would elsewhere be part of normal culture.

Yahoo’s cooperation with China versus RIM’s concessions to Saudi Arabia? Think they’ll catch as much hell?

Doubtful.

Planned Complex Occupation-related Suicide by Captive-bolt Gunshot and Hanging

Herein, we presented a case of occupation-related planned complex suicide, committed by captive-bolt gunshot and hanging. A 29-year-old man, who worked as a butcher, was found dead in the stable, hanging by the neck with a captive-bolt gun embedded in the forehead region of his head. The hanging was complete. Along the bolt canal were bone fragments, and at the end of the path was the punched-out fragment of the skin and soft tissue. There were no fractures of the hyoid bone and laryngeal cartilages, and a superficial hemorrhage was present in the right sternocleidomastoid muscle.

For reference, this is what a captive bolt gun looks like:

It defined complex suicides as “two or more methods are applied either simultaneously or one after the other.” Complicated suicides, on the other hand, involved “The succession of a failed suicidal act and a secondary (“unforeseen” and therefore “accidental”) trauma with fatal outcome…”

The complicated suicides included

four fatalities due to unintended falls from a height (for instance after breaking of the hanging noose), one death from electrocution and one case of drowning.

(Forensic Science International)

Grub Street and Suicide: A View from the Literary Press in Late Eighteenth-Century France provides background including

the callous mockery of the works of the deceased, the dramatisation (or even melodramatisation) of the struggles and disappearance of the individual, and the unstated assumption that suicide constituted a sane and purposeful act. In the eyes of the literary establishment it seemed quite reasonable, and actually quite entertaining, that a second-rate hack would do the world a favour by checking out early. It meant fewer writers to compete with, less competition for scarce pensions and a ‘shocking’ story that helped sell journals.

Although himself a hack writer and the object of police investigations, Linguet shamelessly ridicules Mairobert. He calls the latter a ‘parvenu’ and a muck-raker, and describes the deceased in the most unflattering of terms: ‘He was [...] ultra-insolent, ultra-lowbrow and, above all, ultra-cruel; [he possessed a form of] cruelty, luckily quite rare, that does evil simply for the sake of doing evil, and only bites for the pleasure of ripping things apart.’24 Linguet explicitly ties Mairobert to the Mémoires Secrets, calling the journal a ‘monument of lies’ and a ‘reservoir of infernal impostures’ (p.417).25 He adds, ironically, that providential justice had put the universe back in order by forcing Mairobert into a premature death (p.418).

…Linguet exemplifies a new, more heartless, attitude to suicide – especially when it involved the tenants of Grub Street. Self-inflicted death is a matter neither of sinfulness, nor insanity, nor literary tropes; it is the proper fate of a talentless hack.

One posthumous article not only besmirched a Grub Streeter that committed suicide by drowning, but actually turned the means of suicide into a metaphor for his insufferability:

‘He had, during his life, a secret [talent] that distressed me: he excelled in the genre of boredom; but he knew how to scatter boredom throughout his plays so artistically and in such an imperceptible manner, that one became suffocated without knowing the exact origin of such deadly exhalations’

The manners of the suicides (five profiled in all) tend to be striking as well. While there are more conventional means including drowning and hanging, one case involves suicide by choking oneself on a five inch long metal key. Another case involves the person both slitting his wrists and then shooting himself, something known as a “planned complex suicide” today (where more than one method of suicide is used to ensure completion).

The article can be found in full over at Wiley.

I’ve been a faith of Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett for years now. It’s one of the most thoughtful, sensitive, well-produced shows I’ve found. The freshness and diversity of topics keeps me subscribed and jonesing for the next episode. One recent show, “Listening Generously with Rachel Naomi Remen,” reminded me once again why I like SoF so much. Here’s their description:

Rachel Naomi Remen’s lifelong struggle with chronic illness has shaped her philosophy and practice of medicine. She speaks about the art of listening to patients and other physicians, the difference between curing and healing, and how our losses help us to live.

Tippett’s softhanded interviewing style is perfect for a guest like Dr. Remen. Remen’s intelligence and experience shined as she relayed stories, anecdotes and lessons built over several decades of practice. She began in pediatrics work but soon branched out to dealing with cancer patients not only as medical cases but as whole, hurting people. This at a time before hospice care or anything approaching, when most other physicians didn’t even dream of just listening to their patients as a form of healing.

Remen’s not only a practitioner; she’s dealt with chronic illness firsthand, having dealt with Crohn’s Disease for forty eight years. She speaks of her anger over her illness as “my will to live expressed negatively,” which is a fascinating and important prospect to think about in the midst of loss, whether it’s of health or of a loved one. Another topic covered is the idea that people in those positions focus only on their pain and often fail to see the strength they possess.

The single most important quote I can point to, and i’ll offer without comment, is the following: “Wholeness includes all of our wounds.”

You can find the program available free for download here. You can find Dr. Remen here.

Many of my topics will stay the same; primarily psychology as well as writing. I intend to keep it a bit more focused and certainly more regular. I’m also going to utilize the blog to keep track of and augment my studying as well as share things that might interest the rest of you. As before and as always, you’re welcome and encouraged to join in by commenting, by emailing me, or by catching me on twitter.